Best The Things They Carried Quotes & Sayings

Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart. — Haruki Murakami

I never liked hearing anyone say I was the new George Gershwin, because I knew I could have never even carried that man's music case. If George Gershwin hadn't died when he was thirty-nine years old, there is no knowing how much more great music he would have written. — Burt Bacharach

A man has carried off your mistress, a man has seduced your wife, a man has dishonored your daughter; he has rendered the whole life of one who had the right to expect from heaven that portion of happiness God has promised to every one of his creatures, an existence of misery and infamy; and you think you are avenged because you send a ball through the head, or pass a sword through the breast, of that man who has planted madness in your brain, and despair in your heart. — Alexandre Dumas

I carried my Oscar to bed with me. My first and only three-way happened that night. — Halle Berry

We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back. — Theodor Herzl

If you pay attention to those aspects of God that demonstrate love, truth, beauty, intelligence, order, and spiritual evolution, those aspects will begin to expand in your life. Bit by bit, like a mosaic, disparate fragments of grace will merge to form a complete picture. Eventually this picture will replace the ore threatening one you have carried around inside you since infancy. — Deepak Chopra

A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port, together with some of the surrounding territory. — Albert Einstein

We men should be ashamed of ourselves. I think 85 percent of men are dangerous to women. We need to change to a values system nested in compassion and generosity, and women have carried that torch throughout history. — Patch Adams

In justice to human society it may perhaps be said of almost all the polities and civil institutions in the world, however imperfect, that they have been founded in and carried on with very considerable wisdom. — Ezra Stiles

Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on. — Thomas Carlyle

Feminism or the family? Carried to excess maybe. I have insisted that women cannot be defined solely in those terms. But for a great many women - not all, because we are only beginning to realize and affirm the diversity of women themselves - choosing motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating choice. — Betty Friedan

In a thousand ways, you live by the sword and you die by the sword. When you allow other people to determine your best choices; when you allow yourself to be carried along by what other people think your life should be, could be, must be; when you hand them the pen and tell them to write your story, you don't get the pen back. Not easily anyway. I — Shauna Niequist

I doubt if hard work, steadily and regularly carried on, ever yet hurt anybody. — Arthur Penrhyn Stanley

Things aren't always what they appear,' he said softly, yet his voice carried a grim authority. 'I've spent my life searching for the ultimate, the best. All that is rare, unique, different, special. And of all I've experienced, people are the most disappointing. — Emma Darcy

The petty worries of the
school room must not be carried to your home or boarding place. — Thomas E. Sanders

Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of science has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown. — John Burroughs

To say that you are being carried is a declaration of enormous faith and hope. — Fred Rogers

We find the general work of mankind is being carried on from day to day by the mass of people acting in harmony as if by instinct. If they were instinctively violent, the world would end in no time. — Mahatma Gandhi

I am carried off. We yield to this slow flood ... In and out, we are swept; ... we can not step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls. — Jennifer Niven

I would describe myself like a landscape I've studied at length, in detail; like a word I'm coming to understand; like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime; like my mother's face; like a ship that carried me when the waters raged. — Rainer Maria Rilke

... modern man no longer communicates with the madman [ ... ] There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence. — Michel Foucault

Flashes of my past lives kept crawling across my vision. I had Akima's laugh, Eve's blind ability to love, and Marrah's unwavering belief in family. I was all of these women and none of them. Their souls carried along inside of me but unmistakable from my own.
I saw their lives in pieces, their triumphs and sorrows, loved ones gained and lost. They were all different yet somehow the same. We were sisters and daughters, lovers and wives.
Pacey O'Brien-Lilith — Ashley Jeffery

They carried on sniping in the front seat, and Mae turned back to Jamie. "You doing okay?" she murmured. "Yes," said Jamie, a bit too earnestly. "I love you, Mae. Your hair is the color of flamingos! And I love Nick as well." He gazed soulfully in Nick's direction. "Sometimes when you are not being psychotic, you are quite funny. And you!" He regarded Seb for a long moment. "No, I still don't like you," he decided. "Maybe I need another drink." "I don't think so," Nick said. — Sarah Rees Brennan

They've lied about everything.-about the fence, and the existence of Invalids, about a million other things besides. They told us the raids were carried out for our own protection. They told us the regulators were only interested in keeping the peace.
They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end.
For the very first time I realize, that this, too, maight also be a lie. — Lauren Oliver

Consider the core of the mind to be a wagon, with will-power to be carried about in it. Push it to a place where there can be failure, and there will be failure. Push it to a place where there can be success, and there will be success. But whether there is success or failure, if one entrusts himself to the straightness of this wagon of the core of the mind, he will attain right-mindedness in either case. Severing oneself from desire and being like a rock or tree, nothing will ever be achieved. Not departing from desire, but realizing a desireless right-mindedness - this is the Way. — Takuan Soho

Cultivate the habit of making aware choice. Your choice makes your destiny. Do not be carried away by the unconscious choices. — Amit Ray

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn't allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren't noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor's steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one's sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence. — Wendy Welch

At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him [Walter Benjamin] in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of "pearls" and "coral." On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection. — Hannah Arendt

Women have innate talents and exceptional abilities that go unnoticed by our society, and that women themselves often do not fully appreciate. If every woman were to listen closely enough to her own secret song- not simply with ears, but with eyes (all three!), loins, breasts, heart, spirit, and soul- she would discover a power that she has carried with her since before the beginning of time. — Laurie Cabot

She was more of a business partner to him than anything else. Some of her appreciated that. But rustling yet within her was another person who wanted to bathe and perfume herself ... and be taken, carried away, and peeled back by a force she could sense, but never articulate, even dimly within her mind. — Robert James Waller

IT has been observed by several gentlemen, in vindication of this motion, that if it should be carried, neither my life, liberty, nor estate will be affected. — Robert Walpole

I know there is a moment when sound slips down the torn lining of itself into silence, is carried unheard and secret in its own pocket. But the crimson birds could find no such escape, no means of slipping beyond themselves between the cracks of color and song to a white undiscovered silence. — Janet Frame